Rainforest QA releases Rainforest Mobile

The QA-as-a-Service company wants to streamline mobile app testing

When dealing with quality assurance, especially for mobile and web apps, most teams go with in-house QA or outsource it to teams who specialize in it. The problem with these traditional methods is that it can be a timely, costly process that can lead to bottlenecks, pushing back deadlines and keeping apps from being released in a timely manner.

Rainforest QA, founded in 2013, gives teams quick methods of testing websites on multiple browsers and systems by employing testers from a pool of over 50,000 crowdsourced individuals ready to help test the product. With Rainforest's latest addition, Mobile, they take these same ideas and bring them to the mobile app space.

Rainforest Mobile uses Amazon Device Farm, hosted by Amazon Web Services, to access that pool of 50k testers to quickly and accurately test almost anything a developer might need across Android, ioS, and mobile web apps. Thanks to the large pool of testers, results can be had in 30 minutes. It also allows for multiple functions to be tested simultaneously, saving time and reducing QA tickets. Automation scripts are no longer necessary, and the subscription model will integrate smoothly with existing workflows such as Slack, Codeship, and Jira.

While in-house QA will always have a place, many times there are just too many things that need to be checked to realistically do locally, and Rainforest has found their place in the quality assurance process. From Fred Stevens-Smith, CEO of Rainforest QA, “Exploratory and manual QA models are super slow, with painful management, turning QA into the bottleneck of development and shipping. Instead, we give you the framework to write test cases - and the execution engine to get results - from real devices, tested by real humans."